Over the years, the heavy duty vehicle industry has used tractor and trailer combinations to transport cargo over the roadways to various desired destinations. The tractor and trailer are conventionally mechanically coupled together so that the tractor efficiently and effectively pulls the trailer. Often, one or more additional trailers are also mechanically coupled to another trailer so that only one tractor pulls a plurality of trailers.
Associated with these various tractor/trailer combinations or trucks, various systems have been developed which provide a vehicle operator, a vehicle driver, or other third parties with the weight of a load in the trailer or associated with the truck. These systems, for example, can include sensors mounted to the trailer or truck, a cab mounted display, load supporting air bags, and bag supported platforms or other mounting structures. These systems, however, can be quite complex, can be expensive to purchase and install, and can add additional undesired weight to the vehicle. These systems also often can be easily damaged during use due to the harsh environmental and operating conditions which the vehicle undergoes and can be expensive to maintain or replace. Therefore, these systems are often not desirable by owners of the vehicles, especially owners of a fleet of vehicles such as trucks where these systems would need to be installed and maintained on all of the trucks in the fleet.
More recently, load weight indicating systems have been developed which mount to a heavy duty vehicle having an existing vehicle air bag system for regulating height or levels of a platform. An example of such a system can be seen in U.S. Pat. No. 4,832,141 by Perini et al. titled "Vehicle Mounted Load Indicator System." These systems include somewhat complex look-up tables, table select switches, and a seven segment display and drive circuitry for displaying a precise load weight of goods loaded on a platform of a trailer. The look-up tables include address-to-pressure converting data and address-to-weight data. These load weight indicating systems, however, can still be expensive and provide less desire for vehicle operators to adopt and purchase such systems, especially for entire fleets of heavy duty vehicles such as tractor/trailer combinations or trucks.